International Arts - Museum Services

Edited by Joseph S. Czestochowski

132 color and 70 duotone plates, 12.25x10 in (31.1x25.4 cm), 228 pages, ISBN 0-9716408-2-3

Georgia O'Keeffe is a creative presence in American artistic and cultural history. In her earliest works, O'Keeffe was already a visionary who intuitively created new definitions of the sublime, enhanced our perceptions of its visual symbols, and inevitably provided us with new ways to view our surroundings and explore our inner selves.

Although most of O'Keeffe's works are landscapes, the sublime, for her, was not necessarily associated with a physical location, be it New Mexico, Lake George, or elsewhere. O'Keeffe's was a state of mind in which nature and the sublime transcended specific times and places. The physical landscape was not the source of inspiration but her paintings expressed her inexplicable spiritual response to life and all its manifestations. As only few others, O'Keeffe demonstrated an intuitive association with all that can be considered sublime, and in her remarkable journey with color, line, light, and form from the abstract to the representational and hovering between the two, she pursued a spiritual quest that has, for us, dramatically refined the visual qualities of the sublime, taking an aesthetic concept far beyond the notion defined by traditional visual symbols.

For O’Keeffe, her paintings are powerful poems distilled from her imagination and her vision of our surroundings, seductively simple and appealing, yet highly complex explorations of ever-relevant universal sentiments. Her art spoke directly to twentieth-century modern art with an originality and vitality that today retains a relevance not easily equaled.

• JOHN WILMERDING, Princeton University — author of American Art (1976), American Views: Essays on American Art (1991), and other numerous articles, catalogues and monographs

• SHARYN R. UDALL, College of Santa Fe — author of Modernist Painting in New Mexico, 1913–1935 (1984) and Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (2000)

• MARJORIE BALGE-CROZIER, University of Virginia — co-author of Georgia O’Keeffe—The Poetry of Things (1999) and author of numerous other articles and exhibition catalogues

• EUGENIA PARRY, University of New Mexico — novelist and author of Edgar Degas, Photographer (1998), contributor Photographs of Alfred Stieglitz (2002)

• CHARLES C. ELDREDGE, University of Kansas — author of Georgia O’Keeffe American and Modern (1993) and numerous other exhibition catalogues about the artist

• JAMES TURRELL — artist, subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions and currently completing Roden Crater in northern Arizona

• ROBERT ROSENBLUM, New York University and curator at the Guggenheim Museum, New York — author since 1967 of numerous books on many aspects and periods of art history

• BARBARA NOVAK, Columbia University (retired) — author of Nature and Culture (1980), and other numerous articles, catalogues and monographs

• THERESE MULLIGAN, George Eastman House — author of numerous articles on photography

JOSEPH S. CZESTOCHOWSKI is an American art historian, past museum director, and author of several monographs and critical catalogues. He is the past recipient of the Nancy Hanks Memorial Award from the American Association of Museums, and is active with the University of Illinois Foundation, the Krannert Art Museum Advisory Board, among others. Currently affiliated with an international consulting firm, he is active with several foundations, and works in Memphis and New York.

Specifications —
Cloth, 12.25 x 10 inches, 228 pages, 132 color and 70 duotone images, ISBN 0-9716408-2-3
Edition – 1000 copies. 100 copies have been issued with the signed photograph Georgia O’Keeffe Potting Shed II, 1975, by Dan Budnik.